The following description generally relates generally to a blood pressure monitoring technologies.
Blood pressure is one of the most important vital signs used in the assessment of a (patient's) subject's cardiovascular health. In other words, the blood pressure is one of the most important biological index that contains various health-related information of a patient including cardiac output (CO) defined as the amount of blood ejected by the ventricles of the heart per minute (measured in liters per minute), vascular compliance and physiological changes.
There have been known two existing techniques for monitoring blood pressure, i.e., one is an invasive blood pressure monitoring method and the other is a non-invasive blood pressure monitoring method.
The invasive blood pressure monitoring method is such that a catheter is inserted into an artery and the blood pressure is continuously monitored. The advantage of the invasive blood pressure monitoring method is that the blood pressure can be accurately measured. However, this invasive method of monitoring blood pressure is associated with pain, discomfort and risks of complications to the subject such as infection, thrombosis and air embolism because the catheter must be inserted into an artery at all times.
Noninvasive measurement methods that provide continuous beat-to-beat blood pressure offer an alternative to invasive blood pressure monitoring because they do not carry with them the risk of complications associated with invasive monitoring, as the noninvasive measurement methods measure blood pressure by applying pressure using a blood pressure cuff and monitoring the blood pressure by sound and vibration. Even though they are simple methods to implement, noninvasive measurement methods tend to introduce some inaccuracies.